“Five years after Microsoft sparked a firestorm with new volume licensing and upgrade programs, customers are still struggling with the system many say is delivering less than promised. The programs have not adequately addressed the complexities of licensing, stemmed cost increases or provided a simplified upgrade path, customers say.”
When you make your licensing models as complex as Microsoft’s and make the whole thing a gamble for the purchasers, it’s not going to be pretty. The problems were compounded by the fact the they were late in getting pretty much every product to market, and many people who had bought into the program simply didn’t get much of anything out of it.
And yet these people keep buying from Microsoft; it says either one of two things; the competition is crap and can’t come up with some decent alternatives, or Microsoft make some good software and so, customers are willing to experience a little pain for the gain.
Or they’re already heavily invested in MS products and there’s a very high cost associated with switching.
Which is certainly the case with many large corporations. Once you go with an end-to-end Microsoft solution on the back end it is prohibitively expensive to switch to any other solution; of course, the same could be said for just about any end-to-end solution.
Many companies went with Microsoft because it made things easier to set up (even though it is usually more labor-intensive to maintain) and because there are so many Windows administrators. If your administrator leaves or is hit by a bus, chances are it’ll be pretty easy to find a replacement.
People seem to resent paying through the nose for something over and over again only to find out they own nothing.